Know Your Neighbours

I've heard intermittent thumps and squeaks from the pests in my attic since I moved into this apartment, but this winter has been particularly loud. I have heard them fighting, chasing each other, and having brief but joyous rodent-sex.

Sex I can handle, but I draw the line at chewing, especially when it's done just above my bedroom. I have told the landlords several times that something is chewing up their property but they always act as though I'm saying something obscene in a foreign language; they smile and nod in a non-committal way and then ask me for the rent cheque.

My neighbours last year said that the landlords denied that anything was actually IN the attic, blaming our reports on structural settlage, overactive imaginations, or perhaps ghosts.

This afternoon -- while taking a nap before tonight's drag show -- I was rudely awakened by cacophonous chewing above my bedroom ceiling. Banging on the walls and yelling "shut up!" didn't stop it. Earplugs and box fans were useless. No, I was at the mercy of the Creatures in the Attic, and I was determined to finally get photographic proof of their presence, and also to verify that they were actually squirrels (and not raccoons...they stay up awfully late).

Getting into the attic isn't easy or fun. I need to remove the shelving in a tiny closet -- first finding a place for hundreds of tubes of lipstick and nailpolish bottles -- then contort myself up through a hole that is otherwise blocked by a piece of wood. By the time I'd done this the chewing was still going on.

With camera and flashlight I poked my head into the attic, and here's the monster who was waiting for me:


Awww, cute! Noisy! Destructive! Territorial!

While his invisible sex-buddy continued non-chalantly chewing in one of the corners, this guy circled me several times, seeming more baffled than angry. He made that "chattery" sound that squirrels sometimes make, as if to say "yeah, I'm definitely a squirrel, and I DO like to stay up late."

Then he darted in for the kill:


When you're hanging by your elbows on a thin wooden ledge, your body twisted into a cramp-inducing L-shape, wearing only a robe and with your hands busy with both flashlight and camera, you get a little spooked when wild animals dart at you. Terrified, I shouted "NO!" and he ran away.

I'm going to send these pictures to my landlords and I'll write a typically polite email about it. When I don't receive a reply I'll wait until they come to collect my rent, and then I'll hand them print-outs of the pictures and say "there are squirrels in the attic, and they're chewing holes in the building."

I know what'll happen next. The landlords will nod and smile and walk right back out the door. Later, they'll show the pictures to their children and say "look at these imaginary things, I wonder what they are and where they live?"

"Driving Hands...One Minute at the Wheel, the Next at Tea"

Finally, a 1920s celebrity endorsement that I actually care about!

I don't care about the Cutex Liquid Polish. I care about Anita Loos whose books were outrageously funny.

Seriously, when you need some quick summer reading, pick up "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." It has nothing to do with the movie musical and you can read it in a day.

I'd Buy Anything By...Goldfrapp

I first heard Goldfrapp when a CKMS volunteer played the newly-released "Utopia" for me. Sounding like a cross between a James Bond theme and a piece of degraded electronica, it seemed to be a whole new form of music, something fresh and beautiful and strange. It was like somebody had taken all of my convoluted thoughts and emotions and turned them into one single song.



Eventually Goldfrapp got all glam-sexy, and that's okay too. I haven't heard their new album but I bet it has the same strengths and weaknesses of all the others: five absolutely transcendent songs, mixed in with six or seven pieces of forgettable zilch.

But I'll buy it anyway, because Goldfrapp makes me happy. They're brilliant, unorthodox, individualistic and slightly annoying people.

They haven't released enough to justify "must have" and "stay away" lists. Instead -- tangentially related to the below post about sexy dogs and cats -- here's their "Number One" video. Ridiculous, wonderful, and cute.

Feline Love Symphony

Whenever I delve into pre-60s entertainment I am bound to run across more than one account of cats and dogs getting sexy in the night. You can find tons of novelty songs about this situation (my favourite is "Mama Will Bark"), folks in television shows were always throwing boots and cans at cats on their fences, and the love-howls of cats were a notorious part of the typical "tenement symphony."

So why don't I ever hear them?

I think I heard a cat in heat once -- a brief unearthly howling under my window that was hopefully feline in origin -- and I remember seeing two dogs hopelessly coupled many years ago, but other than that...nothing. The cats just skulk around in search of squirrels, and the dogs just bark out of housebound anxiety, not because they're trying to entice.

(I do have to mention the platonic man-dog love affair carried on between my neighbour and his whippet named "Frodo." Whenever Frodo disappears, my hulking, car-fixing, hyper-masculine neighbour goes staggering around the block screaming "FROOOODO!!!")

Do I live in a well-mannered neighbourhood? Or have we so absorbed the "have your pets spayed or neutered" mantra that we've cut down on late-night amorous yowling? I don't know. But I think I'm glad I'm missing out.

Seen at Reuben's

For a few weeks I've been coming across these disturbing 1928 New Yorker advertisements for Reuben's Restaurant and Delicatessen. They were pretty laid back at first, but now they've exploding into a voyeuristic combination of celebrity-taunting and food fetishism. I quote:

Of course you didn't hear us chuckle, Mr. DUDLEY FIELD MALONE, but odds bodkins, our sense of humor just won't down when we see a legal luminary engaged in victorious debate with a fragrant, savory Reuben's hot Turkey Sandwich! No schoolboy at the jam pot (again) ever displayed more earnest, unqualified appreciation. The pleasure was ours as well as yours, Mr. Malone?

If *I* went someplace for dinner, and then the next day read an advertisement that said "Muffy St. Bernard came into our restaurant and ATE LIKE A CRAZY PIG!" I don't think I'd come back. But I guess any publicity is good publicity...

Here's another:

When a wit once asked us, mock-seriously, "Is this table large enough for a Reuben's apple pancake?" did we rush pell mell to the kitchen to reduce portions? No, we merely smiled smugly--for we knew that GEORGE WHITE would happen along shortly and--demon for details that he is--would surely detect the difference in his pet dish, inimitable spicy deliciousness or no. When you did arrive, Mr. White--did order--did demolish one of our famous over-stuffed apple pancakes--we knew there was little the matter with our blooming policy after all. Reassurance is a great tonic!

Odds bodkins, what a pancake that must have been!

"Yeast Stimulates the Intestine," He Says In Newspaper Interview

I know you rely on me to keep you abreast of all the most serious health menaces, so here's a picture of Dr. Victor Pauchet, Parisian doctor:


According to this October 16, 1928 advertisement in The New Yorker, Pauchet was a real authority about health because he wrote "numerous medical works" including "Surgical Practice" and -- everybody's favourite book -- "Constipation."

This ad for Fleischmann's Yeast (who else?) also contains this choice snippet from the "New York American" newspaper:

PARIS DOCTOR NAMES MENACES TO HEALTH. Dr. Pauchet names the three scourges as alcoholism, social disease and intestinal stagnation. It is for the last that he recommends yeast.

Strangely, in all the testimonials that have appeared for Fleischmann's Yeast throughout the years, I've never seen anybody complaining of a social disease. I guess yeast couldn't cure everything.

Movie Quote Muh-leem

Over at The Mind Wobbles, Hilda posted a fun movie quote muh-leem...and it's interactive so you get to play along!

As a blog mistress, my job was to pick ten of my favourite movies, go to IMDB to find a representative quote from each, post the quotes here, and strike out the quotes when readers guess them correctly.

Here's my list. If you know which movies they're from, write a comment and I'll give you credit. And hey, no cheating by using Google! That wouldn't be any fun. Do this the olde-fashioned way with your brain. No calculators either.

1. You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. (Anonymous)

2. He does the killing, I do the grave digging. You don't do anything. You're just a cook! (Anonymous)

3. I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form. (Anonymous)

4. I am a professional. I have been in this business a long time. Now if I don't want to do a show, it's not because I got stage fright. It's because some creature from beyond doesn't want me to do the show! Now gangway! (Morgan James)

5. Men keep taking advantage of me. I always realize it when it's too late. Look how the Arab world treated me. I sure didn't deserve that. (Morgan James)

6. And to think that in some countries these dogs are eaten. (Anonymous)

7. It's a hard world for little things. (Anonymous)

8. You oughta feel proud that three sailors from the United States Navy got off the ship for one day, and what did they do? Were they thirsty for hard liquor? No. They were thirsty for culture. Were they running after girls? No. They came running to the museum to see your dinosaur. (Anonymous)

9. And what charming underclothes you both have. But here. Put these on. They'll make you feel less... vulnerable. It's not often we receive visitors here, let alone offer them... hospitality. (Anonymous)

10. I looked for you in my closet tonight. (Anonymous)

I tried to pick movies that people have actually seen to, you know, make this fair.

Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn

This weekend I decided to re-read Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," and it's the first time I've immersed myself in Pynchon's writing for several years.

It's beautiful. He tickles you with immediate, funny dialog, then he begins to dip you into the world's chaos, and suddenly you're reduced to unweaving the unconventional, almost cryptic prose that comprise the novel's most important revelations. If you can stay on the track and concentrate intensely, you are left with a nugget of meaning that could not have been conveyed any other way. If you get lost, you're angry. Go back and read it again.

The theme of "The Crying of Lot 49" is one that has always intrigued me: the search for meaning, pattern, and design in an apparently random world.

And the voices before and after the dead man's that had phoned at random during the darkest, slowest hours, searching ceaseless among the dial's ten million possibilities for that magical Other who would reveal herself out of the roar of relays, monotone litanies of insult, filth, fantasy, love whose brute repetition must someday call into being the trigger for the unnameable act, the recognition, the word.

The characters in Pynchon's best-loved works are following up on tantalizing hints that something is going on behind the official scenes. What is "V?" What is "Tristero?" And what shape do you see when you connect the dots around "Gravity's Rainbow?" Is there a conspiracy? A hoax? Or are you simply seeing "order" because humans are hard-wired to see such things?

A beautiful book, it has inspired me to re-tackle "Mason & Dixon" in preparation for Pynchon's most recent novel, "Against the Day." Time to work on my upper-body strength.

Domestic Drag Show: "Fever" by Annabella Lwin

For those who enjoy watching me scamper around my living room, here's a new domestic drag show: "Fever," performed by Annabella Lwin (of "Bow Wow Wow" fame). With a special cameo by Melody Valentine (and not a seal in sight)!



Notes:

I think I've compared "editing a video with iMovie" to "herding cats." Well, it's more like herding donkeys, but the more I use it I discover additional tips and tricks.

This one was storyboarded, but it mainly came together within iMovie itself. By using "split video at playhead" as opposed to any of the cropping tools, I find I can better organize and synchronize multiple clips on the single video track. So this one is very much edited "on the fly," as required by the spunky-modern song.

This process is still very tedious. Every single edit must be individually synchronized, you must work from beginning to end, and you don't have a hope of changing anything once you've done it. But it's still better than endlessly cropping and uncropping the clips.

PS: I buy most of my props at Home Hardware because their ugly stuff is "over the top," and anything more subtle wouldn't show up on video. Hence that terrifying red "seedpod" thing, which cost me $10 but was well worth the embarrassment.

Thwarted By Mother Nature

Jan, Victoria and I had scheduled a "wine, chat, bitch, and bar" night tonight. Then Mother Nature came along and blew it all away.

Victoria wisely called in to cancel at 9pm; it was simply looking too terrible outside. Jan called several times from each of the three buses he was in, each bus stuck about 100 meters in front of the last one. He, too, finally decided to call it a night (but you can't fault him for perseverance!)

As for me, I'd spent two hours getting into drag and wasn't going to go down without a fight. I have a long record of kicking Mother Nature's butt...I'm hardly squeamish about snow, wind, and cold.

Knowing that cabs were not an option I donned my most practical boots and began to walk. The snow came up to my knees. Seriously, even with my six-inch platforms, I was walking through knee-deep snow.

So after a few minutes of this I veered into the road to take advantage of the single line of tire tracks available. It was exhausting to walk in tire tracks, and whenever a car came I needed to flounder away into a snow bank.

The wind was nearly blowing me off my feet. Snow was still falling. After two blocks I turned around and came back to my warm, snow-free apartment. Mother Nature won this one hands down. I pity the fool who's out tonight.